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nevesmose · 1 year ago

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Syndroma Holmiensis

Things are different now. That was the last advice Mikulin's father had given him. The Imperium is the biggest gang on the whole planet. The Night Haunter's gang. Stick with them and you'll do fine, son.

His father had lost an eye in a streetfight years ago and the bribe to fit an augmetic was far beyond their means. Mikulin tried to focus twice as much on the other eye instead, solid depthless black like those of every other Nostraman, as it gleamed with something like desperation combined with raw avarice.

Was it hope, he wondered? Something so rare on the Sunless World that they'd had to steal the Gothic word to describe it exactly. Whatever sibiliant kennings and poetic phrases his ancestors had used to subtly imply the possibility of a better future were gone now. Inefficient in comparison to the language of their new overlords.

Most of the time Mikulin found it hard to care overmuch. His ancestors had mined adamantium and murdered one another in the dark for century upon century and achieved nothing. Built nothing. Created nothing but further generations of void-eyed killers.

Until the Night Haunter came. He who flayed and freed Nostramo, pinned the planet down and eviscerated it inch by inch, block by block, heart by heart and corpse by corpse until nothing was left but order and a full stomach.

Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.

It was natural for him to hold both thoughts simultaneously. He loved and feared his father too, didn't he? A strong provider, working shifts in the mine when the work was there and doing what he had to when it wasn't. But also a monster when he'd been paid and given the money straight back to the company bar.

When he was old enough to work they moved to the nearest great city, Nostramo Secundus. Dear Grey Place, the Adamantite City, a hive built into a vast outcropping of ore-bearing rock that jutted out into the roiling black ocean.

His father had called it a promotion, but the truth came out eventually. The mine bosses were scared that his drunken actions, his too-public offences against the new rules of society, would bring the Night Haunter to them. And the Night Haunter rarely found just one criminal worthy of punishment when paying a visit.

Far safer, therefore, to send the problem away into the teeming masses of the nearest hive city. Losing the work had destroyed his father but Secundus gave Mikulin a new razorgang to run with and all the freedom he was brave enough to steal. And he had the Night Haunter to thank for it.

Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.

Mikulin cared little and knew less of the other demigods who had come later, surrounded by an inferno of blinding light and guarding their father the Emperor. Such events, occurring so far away in the capital, were of little importance to remote grey Secundus. Only the Night Haunter mattered because time and distance meant nothing to him. He could be anywhere on Nostramo, seeing and hearing all in his domain and dispensing punishment to the high and the low alike.

Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.

Then the news reached Secundus that the Night Haunter had left to join his father and brothers in conquering the galaxy for humanity. Mikulin had looked up at the coldly glinting stars and felt a twist of envious fury in his gut. They had taken Nostramo's king from his people and wouldn't even use his name.

Konrad Curze, the Emperor had called him. An alien name from an alien being. Mikulin knew it was the Night Haunter who Nostramo's first Astartes followed into the void, him and no other.

They had tested Mikulin once for suitability. Just put your hand in the box on the servitor's chest. A brief sting and a few moments later the verdict was given - negative. Elevated hereditary cancer risk and other minor genetic flaws not meeting the threshold of mutation, the magos biologis announced before moving on to the next prospective recruit.

Stick with the Night Haunter's gang, his father had said. So Mikulin had apprenticed himself to the Administratum, serving the new Planetary Governor appointed in the Night Haunter's place. One of the first natives to join, they said.

Natives grated in his mind like two ends of a broken bone. We weren't natives before you came, before you took him away. We were ourselves. But things are different now.

The first time he really saw offworlders up close he'd just about managed not to stare, or grimace in the closed-off Nostraman way which, to the initiated, was just as expressive as a scream. Someone has put coins in your eyes, he'd thought irrationally, or broken glass in different colours. It happened sometimes as punishment for people who sold out their gangmates or saw things they shouldn't have.

It took him a long while to accept that it was just how they were, the same way they walked the street wrong, slowly, looking at the sights around them like prey. Behaving like that would get a Nostraman killed but, collectively, there seemed to be an indulgence for offworlders.

They didn't know what the people said or thought about them and they didn't have to care. Often Mikulin found himself hating them, hating their accents and their language at the same time as he learned to mimic both to rise up in their organisation.

The outsiders planned great things for Nostramo in the Imperium. We can make this world so much better, someone with eyes the colour of ice melting into slush told him. Mikulin said nothing.

They built Nostramo Secundus a botanical garden to rival any city in the Imperium. A vast adamantium-ribbed dome of glass filled with a kaleidoscope of verdant colour and shape tended by specialised horticultural servitors, the whole edifice illuminated by numberless ultraviolet and visible-spectrum lamps to allow the plantlife to thrive even on the Sunless World.

On the wall surrounding their creation, where Mikulin had to pass every day to reach the Administratum complex, the offworlders had commissioned some famed remembrancer to paint a mural of a lush, rolling Terran landscape lit by a rising sun and bearing the title LET NOSTRAMO FLOURISH.

The people of Nostramo Secundus hated it and the building it adorned. The cost of entry was high enough to exclude all but the wealthiest and every Nostraman visitor had to wear thick eyeshades or else suffer hours of headache and near-blindness, all just to look at plants. Mystifying.

Mikulin had access to the records of just how much power, water and heat the gardens drew away from the rest of the city. How many hab-tenements could the same resources support instead? He had calculated it once on a scrap of parchment and the answer sickened him.

The Night Haunter would have judged the creation in an instant, razed it to the ground and impaled the builders among the wreckage. Eventually Mikulin came to realise that the gardens were never really intended for him or any other native, only to improve the lot of the offworlders condemned to serve the Imperium on dark forbidding Nostramo.

Once, without thinking, he'd saluted an Administratum superior in the Nostraman way, hand clawed over his heart to say may it be torn out if I am untrue. The condescension and pity in their eyes had struck him like a physical blow.

Damn you all, he thought, eyes stinging with a shame he couldn't begin to process. Take your costume-jewellery eyes and your costume-jewellery Imperium and leave us alone like we always should have been. Our world was already better. We were already better.

Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.

Mikulin grew old slowly, the decay held back by juvenats and technology for as long as the Administratum had the budgetary headroom to provide. Nostramo seemed to rot quickly in comparison. The nobility and oligarchs reappeared with new names and faces but the same blood in their veins, the same corruption in their hearts, and no Night Haunter any more to excise them like a chirurgeon.

He didn't remember exactly when it happened, but one work cycle he realised that the Imperium was no longer the biggest gang on the planet. Work orders, requisitions, suicide statistics, every item of paperwork that used to filter upwards to the Administratum had slowed to a trickle and eventually just stopped.

Mikulin continued to attend the office and the Administratum continued to pay him, but in reality the alternative government of the gangs and nobles had slipped into place like a knife between ribs to quietly usurp both their functions.

Eventually the last offworlders left Secundus. No one would say whether it was voluntary. Their replacements were black-eyed and loyal only to the shifting politics of the warlords they followed. They funnelled the city's sparse resources to pay debts and shore up alliances before the newer, hungrier gangs overthrew them and were consumed in turn by their own children in the incestuous reproductive cycle that was as irredeemably Nostraman as the smog filling up their lungs.

Through it all, Mikulin of the Administratum was present, observed and said nothing. They treated him with something like respect - that rarest of things, an elderly Nostraman.

In the end it was Mikulin who finally closed down the botanical gardens. Let the plants rot and the gangs split the proceeds however they pleased. He left and went back to his tenement, hobbling slowly the same way he did everything else now, and went past that accursed mural once again.

It had been smashed and defaced countless times, the people of Nostramo Secundus giving vent to their fury at the image of an idyllic fantasy they would never possess. The rising sun was blotted out by an arterial splash of black paint and, above it all, someone had scrawled new blood-red lettering to change the painting's title.

LET NOSTRAMO PERISH.

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